Back in Bangkok we were dropped off at the train station for our journey north to Ayathaya. Our guide bought our train tickets and then quickly bade us adieu. Our tickets were the cheapest of the cheap and we were crammed into carriages containing only Thai people. Not another farang in sight. I, Dave, was without a seat and so stood along with countless others. The journey which should have taken about 1.5 hours ended up taking almost 4.5 hours...and then we missed our station!! Half the carriages did not make it onto the platform and so we were not aware that we had arrived. At the next station, about 20 mins further up the line we managed to get a local man to drive us back to Ayathaya for 500 baht. The guy was a maniac. First of all he couldn't see out of his windscreen with all the condensation and secondly he kept overtaking like a....well, like a maniac. Claire later told me she had been thinking about what her last conversation with her dad had been like and how the police would make sense of these of these two farangs killed in a car crash outside of Ayathaya with this crazy guy. We were very very happy to arrive at our hostel. It had been a long day.
Ayathaya had been the capital of Thailand before the Burmese laid siege upon it, whereupon the king then scampered to what is present day Bangkok. It is not the most attractive town although it does have plenty of Buddhist ruins to keep the tourist occupied. Also home to the famous Buddha head sacked by the Burmese and left at the base of a bodhi tree at Wat Phra Mahathat.It was here however that we got our first taste of monsoon rain. Our exploring was curtailed by a series of torrential downpours. If you received an email from us recently it was probably sent from Ayathaya!
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